The still undeveloped possibilities of Science, (25),and--in the broadest spirit--

The Human Adventure. (26)

CONTENTS

1. The Coming of Bleriot

2. My First Flight

3. Off the Chain

4. Of the New Reign

5. Will the Empire Live?

6. The Labour Unrest

7. The Great State

8. The Common Sense of Warfare

9. The Contemporary Novel

10. The Philosopher's Public Library

11. About Chesterton and Belloc

12. About Sir Thomas More

13. Traffic and Rebuilding

14. The So-called Science of Sociology

15. Divorce

16. The Schoolmaster and the Empire

17. The Endowment of Motherhood

18. Doctors

19. An Age of Specialisation

20. Is there a People?

21. The Disease of Parliaments

22. The American Population

23. The Possible Collapse of Civilisation

24. The Ideal Citizen

25. Some Possible Discoveries

26. The Human Adventure

AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD

THE COMING OF BLERIOT

(_July, 1909_.)

The telephone bell rings with the petulant persistence that marks atrunk call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn todeal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up,minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another andare submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the realmessage comes through: "Bleriot has crossed the Channel.... An article... about what it means."

I make a hasty promise and go out and tell my friends.

From my garden I look straight upon the Channel, and there are whitecaps upon the water, and the iris and tamarisk are all asway with thesouth-west wind that was also blowing yesterday. M. Bleriot has donevery well, and Mr. Latham, his rival, had jolly bad luck. That is whatit means to us first of all. It also, I reflect privately, means that Ihave under-estimated the possible stability of aeroplanes. I did notexpect anything of the sort so soon. This is a good five years before myreckoning of the year before last.

We all, I think, regret that being so near we were not among thefortunate ones who saw that little flat shape skim landward out of theblue; surely they have an enviable memory; and then we fell talking anddisputing about what that swift arrival may signify. It starts a swarmof questions.

First one remarks that here is a thing done, and done with anastonishing effect of ease, that was incredible not simply to ignorantpeople but to men well informed in these matters. It cannot be fifteenyears ago since Sir Hiram Maxim made the first machine that could liftits weight from the ground, and I well remember how the clumsy qualityof that success confirmed the universal doubt that men could ever in anyeffectual manner fly.

Since then a conspiracy of accidents has changed the whole problem; thebicycle and its vibrations developed the pneumatic tyre, the pneumatictyre rendered a comfortable mechanically driven road vehicle possible,the motor-car set an enormous premium on the development of very light,very efficient engines, and at last the engineer was able to offer theexperimentalists in gliding one strong enough and light enough for thenew purpose. And here we are! Or, rather, M. Bleriot is!

What does it mean for us?

One meaning, I think, stands out plainly enough, unpalatable enough toour national pride. This thing from first to last was made abroad. Ofall that made it possible we can only claim so much as is due to theimprovement of the bicycle. Gliding began abroad while our young men ofmuscle and courage were braving the dangers of the cricket field. Themotor-car and its engine was being worked out "over there," while inthis country the mechanically propelled road vehicle, lest it shouldfrighten the carriage horses of the gentry, was going meticulously atfour miles an hour behind a man with a red flag. Over there, where theprosperous classes have some regard for education and some freedom ofimaginative play, where people discuss all sorts of things fearlessly,and have a respect for science, this has been achieved.

And now our insularity is breached by the foreigner who has got aheadwith flying.

It means, I take it, first and foremost for us, that the world cannotwait for the English.

It is not the first warning we have had. It has been raining warningsupon us; never was a slacking, dull people so liberally served withwarnings of what was in store for them. But this event--thisforeigner-invented, foreigner-built, foreigner-steered thing, taking oursilver streak as a bird soars across a rivulet--puts the casedramatically. We have fallen behind in the quality of our manhood. Inthe men of means and leisure in this island there was neither enterpriseenough, imagination enough, knowledge nor skill enough to lead in thismatter. I do not see how one can go into the history of this developmentand arrive at any other conclusion. The French and Americans can laughat our aeroplanes, the Germans are ten years ahead of our poornavigables. We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either weare a people essentially and incurably inferior, or there is somethingwrong in our training, something benumbing in our atmosphere andcircumstances. That is the first and gravest intimation in M. Bleriot'sfeat.

The second is that, in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from themilitary point of view, an inaccessible island.

So long as one had to consider the navigable balloon the aerial side ofwarfare remained unimportant. A Zeppelin is little good for any purposebut scouting and espionage. It can carry very little weight inproportion to its vast size, and, what is more important, it cannot dropthings without sending itself up like a bubble in soda water. An armadaof navigables sent against this island would end in a dispersed,deflated state, chiefly in the seas between Orkney and Norway--though Isay it who should not. But these aeroplanes can fly all round thefastest navigable that ever drove before the wind; they can dropweights, take up weights, and do all sorts of able, inconvenient things.They are birds. As for the birds, so for aeroplanes; there is an upwardlimit of size. They are not going to be very big, but they are going tobe very able and active. Within a year we shall have--or rather _they_will have--aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais, let us say,circling over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive uponthe printing machines of _The Times_, and returning securely to Calaisfor another similar parcel. They are things neither difficult nor costlyto make. For the price of a Dreadnought one might have hundreds. Theywill be extremely hard to hit with any sort of missile. I do not think alarge army of under-educated, under-trained, extremely unwillingconscripts is going to be any good against this sort of thing.

I do not think that the arrival of M. Bleriot means a panic resort toconscription. It is extremely desirable that people should realise thatthese foreign machines are not a temporary and incidental advantage thatwe can make good by fussing and demanding eight, and saying we won'twait, and so on, and then subsiding into indolence again. They are justthe first-fruits of a steady, enduring lead that the foreigner has won.The foreigner is ahead of us in education, and this is especially trueof the middle and upper classes, from which invention and enterprisecome--or, in our own case, do not come. He makes a better class of manthan we do. His science is better than ours. His training is better thanours. His imagination is livelier. His mind is more active. Hisrequirements in a novel, for example, are not kindly, sedative pap; hisuncensored plays deal with reality. His schools are places for vigorouseducation instead of genteel athleticism, and his home has books in it,and thought and conversation. Our homes and schools are relatively dulland uninspiring; there is no intellectual guide or stir in them; and tothat we owe this new generation of nicely behaved, unenterprising sons,who play golf and dominate the tailoring of the world, while Brazilians,Frenchmen, Americans and Germans fly.

That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is not a fact byitself. It is merely an indication that we are behindhand in ourmechanical knowledge and invention M. Bleriot's aeroplane points also tothe fleet.

The struggle for naval supremacy is not merely a struggle inshipbuilding and expenditure. Much more is it a struggle in knowledgeand invention. It is not the Power that has the most ships or thebiggest ships that is going to win in a naval conflict. It is the Powerthat thinks quickest of what to do, is most resourceful and inventive.Eighty Dreadnoughts manned by dull men are only eighty targets for aquicker adversary. Well, is there any reason to suppose that our Navyis going to keep above the general national level in these things? Isthe Navy _bright_?

The arrival of M. Bleriot suggests most horribly to me how far behind wemust be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance.I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realisedthat it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it waspossible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench todefy shrapnel. Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, andfished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what aconfoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy haddone to him.

Very probably the Navy is the exception to the British system; itsofficers are rescued from the dull homes and dull schools of their classwhile still of tender years, and shaped after a fashion of their own.But M. Bleriot reminds us that we may no longer shelter and degeneratebehind these blue backs. And the keenest men at sea are none the worsefor having keen men on land behind them.

Are we an awakening people?

It is the vital riddle of our time. I look out upon the windy Channeland think of all those millions just over there, who seem to get busierand keener every hour. I could imagine the day of reckoning coming likea swarm of birds.

Here the air is full of the clamour of rich and prosperous peopleinvited to pay taxes, and beyond measure bitter. They are going to liveabroad, cut their charities, dismiss old servants, and do all sorts ofsilly, vindictive things. We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothingsin the endowment of research. Not one in twenty of the boys of themiddle and upper classes learns German or gets more than a misleadingsmattering of physical science. Most of them never learn to speakFrench. Heaven alone knows what they do with their brains! The Britishreading and thinking public probably does not number fifty thousandpeople all told. It is difficult to see whence the necessary impetus fora national renascence is to come.... The universities are poor andspiritless, with no ambition to lead the country. I met a Boy Scoutrecently. He was hopeful in his way, but a little inadequate, I thought,as a basis for confidence in the future of the Empire.

We have still our Derby Day, of course....

Apart from these patriotic solicitudes, M. Bleriot has set quite anothertrain of thought going in my mind. The age of natural democracy issurely at an end through these machines. There comes a time when menwill be sorted out into those who will have the knowledge, nerve, andcourage to do these splendid, dangerous things, and those who willprefer the humbler level. I do not think numbers are going to matter somuch in the warfare of the future, and that when organised intelligencediffers from the majority, the majority will have no adequate power ofretort. The common man with a pike, being only sufficiently indignantand abundant, could chase the eighteenth century gentleman as he chose,but I fail to see what he can do in the way of mischief to an elusivechevalier with wings. But that opens too wide a discussion for me toenter upon now.

MY FIRST FLIGHT

(EASTBOURNE, _August 5, 1912--three years later_.)

Hitherto my only flights have been flights of imagination but thismorning I flew. I spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the air; we wentout to sea, soared up, came back over the land, circled higher, planedsteeply down to the water, and I landed with the conviction that I hadhad only the foretaste of a great store of hitherto unsuspectedpleasures. At the first chance I will go up again, and I will go higherand further.

This experience has restored all the keenness of my ancient interest inflying, which had become a little fagged and flat by too much hearingand reading about the thing and not enough participation. Sixteen yearsago, in the days of Langley and Lilienthal, I was one of the fewjournalists who believed and wrote that flying was possible; it affectedmy reputation unfavourably, and produced in the few discouraged pioneersof those days a quite touching gratitude. Over my mantel as I writehangs a very blurred and bad but interesting photograph that ProfessorLangley sent me sixteen years ago. It shows the flight of the firstpiece of human machinery heavier than air that ever kept itself up forany length of time. It was a model, a little affair that would not havelifted a cat; it went up in a spiral and came down unsmashed, bringingback, like Noah's dove, the promise of tremendous things.

That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing to recall howcautiously even we out-and-out believers did our prophesying. I wasquite a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we shouldsee men flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many years tocome it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring andskill. We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeplyimpressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridgemathematician produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitchfearfully, that as it flew on its pitching _must_ increase until up wentits nose, down went its tail, and it fell like a knife. We exaggeratedevery possibility of instability. We imagined that when the aeroplanewasn't "kicking up ahind and afore" it would be heeling over to thelightest side wind. A sneeze might upset it. We contrasted our poorhuman equipment with the instinctive balance of a bird, which has hadten million years of evolution by way of a start....

The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne this morning with Mr.Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt.

Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity tospeculations about the psychological and physiological effects offlying. Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high towerfeel some slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread.Even if men struggled high into the air, we asked, wouldn't they besmitten up there by such a lonely and reeling dismay as to lose allself-control? And, above all, wouldn't the pitching and tossing makethem quite horribly sea-sick?

I have always been a little haunted by that last dread. It gave a littleundertow of funk to the mood of lively curiosity with which I gotaboard the waterplane this morning--that sort of faint, thin funk thatso readily invades one on the verge of any new experience; when onetries one's first dive, for example, or pushes off for the first timedown an ice run. I thought I should very probably be sea-sick--or, to bemore precise, air-sick; I thought also that I might be very giddy, andthat I might get thoroughly cold and uncomfortable None of those thingshappened.

I am still in a state of amazement at the smooth steadfastness of themotion. There is nothing on earth to compare with that, unless--and thatI can't judge--it is an ice yacht travelling on perfect ice. The finestmotor-car in the world on the best road would be a joggling, quiveringthing beside it.

To begin with, we went out to sea before the wind, and the plane wouldnot readily rise. We went with an undulating movement, leaping with alight splashing pat upon the water, from wave to wave. Then we cameabout into the wind and rose, and looking over I saw that there were nolonger those periodic flashes of white foam. I was flying. And it was asstill and steady as dreaming. I watched the widening distance betweenour floats and the waves. It wasn't by any means a windless day; therewas a brisk, fluctuating breeze blowing out of the north over the downs.It seemed hardly to affect our flight at all.

And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does not feel it at all.It is difficult to explain why this should be so, but it is so. Isuppose in such matters I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor ismy head exceptionally given to swimming. I can stand on the edge ofcliffs of a thousand feet or so and look down, but I can never bringmyself right up to the edge nor crane over to look to the very bottom. Ishould want to lie down to do that. And the other day I was on thatBelvedere place at the top of the Rotterdam sky-scraper, a rather highwind was blowing, and one looks down through the chinks between theboards one stands on upon the heads of the people in the streets below;I didn't like it. But this morning I looked directly down on a littlefleet of fishing boats over which we passed, and on the crowdsassembling on the beach, and on the bathers who stared up at us from thebreaking surf, with an entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, inthe early morning sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness ofa town viewed from high up on the side of a great mountain.

When Mr. Grahame-White told me we were going to plane down I willconfess I tightened my hold on the sides of the car and prepared forsomething like the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on alarger scale. Just for a moment there was that familiar feeling ofsomething pressing one's heart up towards one's shoulders, and one'slower jaw up into its socket and of grinding one's lower teeth againstthe upper, and then it passed. The nose of the car and all the machinewas slanting downwards, we were gliding quickly down, and yet there wasno feeling that one rushed, not even as one rushes in coasting a hill ona bicycle. It wasn't a tithe of the thrill of those three descents onegets on the great mountain railway in the White City. There one gets adisagreeable quiver up one's backbone from the wheels, and a real senseof falling.

It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous of anycollision. Some time ago I was in a motor-car that ran over and killed asmall dog, and this wretched little incident has left an open wound uponmy nerves. I am never quite happy in a car now; I can't help keeping anapprehensive eye ahead. But you fly with an exhilarating assurance thatyou cannot possibly run over anything or run into anything--except theland or the sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully safedistance away.

I had heard a great deal of talk about the deafening uproar of theengine. I counted a headache among my chances. There again reasonreinforced conjecture. When in the early morning Mr. Travers came fromBrighton in this Farman in which I flew I could hear the hum of thegreat insect when it still seemed abreast of Beachy Head, and a good twomiles away. If one can hear a thing at two miles, how much the more willone not hear it at a distance of two yards? But at the risk of seemingtoo contented for anything I will assert I heard that noise no more thanone hears the drone of an electric ventilator upon one's table. It wasonly when I came to speak to Mr. Grahame-White, or he to me, that Idiscovered that our voices had become almost infinitesimally small.

And so it was I went up into the air at Eastbourne with the impressionthat flying was still an uncomfortable experimental, and slightly heroicthing to do, and came down to the cheerful gathering crowd upon thesands again with the knowledge that it is a thing achieved for everyone.It will get much cheaper, no doubt, and much swifter, and be improved ina dozen ways--we _must_ get self-starting engines, for example, for bothour aeroplanes and motor-cars--but it is available to-day for anyonewho can reach it. An invalid lady of seventy could have enjoyed all thatI did if only one could have got her into the passenger's seat. Gettingthere was a little difficult, it is true; the waterplane was out in thesurf, and I was carried to it on a boatman's back, and then had toclamber carefully through the wires, but that is a matter of detail.This flying is indeed so certain to become a general experience that Iam sure that this description will in a few years seem almost as quaintas if I had set myself to record the fears and sensations of my FirstRide in a Wheeled Vehicle. And I suspect that learning to control aFarman waterplane now is probably not much more difficult than, let ussay, twice the difficulty in learning the control and management of amotor-bicycle. I cannot understand the sort of young man who won't learnhow to do it if he gets half a chance.

The development of these waterplanes is an important step towards thehuge and swarming popularisation of flying which is now certainlyimminent. We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote aboutflying before there was any flying used to make a great fuss about thedangers and difficulties of landing and getting up. We wrote with vastgravity about "starting rails" and "landing stages," and it is stilltrue that landing an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite levelexpanse, is a risky and uncomfortable business. But getting up andlanding upon fairly smooth water is easier than getting into bed. Thisalone is likely to determine the aeroplane routes along the line of theworld's coastlines and lake groups and waterways. The airmen will go toand fro over water as the midges do. Wherever there is a square mile ofwater the waterplanes will come and go like hornets at the mouth oftheir nest. But there are much stronger reasons than this conveniencefor keeping over water. Over water the air, it seems, lies in greatlevel expanses; even when there are gales it moves in uniform masseslike the swift, still rush of a deep river. The airman, in Mr.Grahame-White's phrase, can go to sleep on it. But over the land, andfor thousands of feet up into the sky, the air is more irregular than atorrent among rocks; it is--if only we could see it--a waving, whirling,eddying, flamboyant confusion. A slight hill, a ploughed field, thestreets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams andcataracts of air that catch the airman unawares, make him dropdisconcertingly, try his nerves. With a powerful enough engine he climbsat once again, but these sudden downfalls are the least pleasant andmost dangerous experience in aviation. They exact a tiring vigilance.

Over lake or sea, in sunshine, within sight of land, this is the perfectway of the flying tourist. Gladly would I have set out for France thismorning instead of returning to Eastbourne. And then coasted round toSpain and into the Mediterranean. And so by leisurely stages to India.And the East Indies....

I find my study unattractive to-day.

OFF THE CHAIN

(_December, 1910_)

I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year," andnoting how much the world can change in seventy years.

I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire inthat ex-sheriff's coach he bought in Long Acre--where now the motor-carsare sold--when there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain Mr.Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a little excursion.He had left London last Saturday week at midday; he hoped to be back byThursday; and he had talked to the President in Washington, visitedPhiladelphia, and had a comparatively loitering afternoon in New York.What had I to say about it?

Firstly, that I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren. Andfailing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "AmericanNotes" with such passionate disgust and hostility about the firstCunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing theAtlantic by steamship, could have shared Mr. Holt's experience.

Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that Mr. Holt has takendays where weeks were needed fifty years ago, but that he has done itvery comfortably, without undue physical exertion, and at no greaterexpense, I suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey nearlykilled.

If Mr. Holt's expenses were higher, it was for the special trains andthe sake of the record. Anyone taking ordinary trains and ordinarypassages may do what he has done in eighteen or twenty days.

When I was a boy, "Around the World in Eighty Days" was still abrilliant piece of imaginative fiction. Now that is almost an invalid'space. It will not be very long before a man will be able to go round theworld if he wishes to do so ten times in a year. And it is perhapsforgivable if those who, like Jules Verne, saw all these increments inspeed, motor-cars, and airships aeroplanes, and submarines, wirelesstelegraphy and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from thepromises of physical science, should turn upon a world that read anddoubted and jeered with "I told you so. _Now_ will you respect aprophet?"

It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicableillumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they wereprepared with ample reasons for the things they foretold. Now, quite asconfidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, highprobabilities that follow on all this tremendous development of swift,secure, and cheapened locomotion, just as they followed almostnecessarily upon the mechanical developments of the last century.

Briefly, the ties that bind men to place are being severed; we are inthe beginning of a new phase in human experience.

For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating after his food,camping, homeless, as to this day are many of the Indians and Esquimauxin the Hudson Bay Territory. Then began agriculture, and for the sake ofsecurer food man tethered himself to a place. The history of man'sprogress from savagery to civilisation is essentially a story ofsettling down. It begins in caves and shelters; it culminates in a widespectacle of farms and peasant villages, and little towns among thefarms. There were wars, crusades, barbarous invasions, set-backs, but tothat state all Asia, Europe, North Africa worked its way with anindomitable pertinacity. The enormous majority of human beings stayed athome at last; from the cradle to the grave they lived, married, died inthe same district, usually in the same village; and to that condition,law, custom, habits, morals, have adapted themselves. The whole plan andconception of human society is based on the rustic home and the needsand characteristics of the agricultural family. There have been gipsies,wanderers, knaves, knights-errant and adventurers, no doubt, but thesettled permanent rustic home and the tenure of land about it, and thehens and the cow, have constituted the fundamental reality of the wholescene. Now, the really wonderful thing in this astonishing developmentof cheap, abundant, swift locomotion we have seen in the last seventyyears--in the development of which Mauretanias, aeroplanes,mile-a-minute expresses, tubes, motor-buses and motor cars are just thebright, remarkable points--is this: that it dissolves almost all thereason and necessity why men should go on living permanently in any oneplace or rigidly disciplined to one set of conditions. The formerattachment to the soil ceases to be an advantage. The human spirit hasnever quite subdued itself to the laborious and established life; itachieves its best with variety and occasional vigorous exertion underthe stimulus of novelty rather than by constant toil, and thisrevolution in human locomotion that brings nearly all the globe withina few days of any man is the most striking aspect of the unfetteringagain of the old restless, wandering, adventurous tendencies in man'scomposition.

Already one can note remarkable developments of migration. There is, forexample, that flow to and fro across the Atlantic of labourers from theMediterranean. Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the UnitedStates in the spring and return in the autumn. Again, there is a streamof thousands of prosperous Americans to summer in Europe. Compared withany European country, the whole population of the United States isfluid. Equally notable is the enormous proportion of the Britishprosperous which winters either in the high Alps or along the Riviera.England is rapidly developing the former Irish grievance of an absenteepropertied class. It is only now by the most strenuous artificialbanking back that migrations on a far huger scale from India intoAfrica, and from China and Japan into Australia and America areprevented.

All the indications point to a time when it will be an altogetherexceptional thing for a man to follow one occupation in one place allhis life, and still rarer for a son to follow in his father's footstepsor die in his father's house.

The thing is as simple as the rule of three. We are off the chain oflocality for good and all. It was necessary heretofore for a man to livein immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for himto reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay oftransport were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he wassettled. _Now_ he may live twenty or thirty miles away from hisoccupation; and it often pays him to spend the small amount of time andmoney needed to move--it may be half-way round the world--to healthierconditions or more profitable employment.

And with every diminution in the cost and duration of transport itbecomes more and more possible, and more and more likely, to beprofitable to move great multitudes of workers seasonally betweenregions where work is needed in this season and regions where work isneeded in that. They can go out to the agricultural lands at one timeand come back into towns for artistic work and organised work infactories at another. They can move from rain and darkness intosunshine, and from heat into the coolness of mountain forests. Childrencan be sent for education to sea beaches and healthy mountains.

Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down in great liners to spendthe winter working in the forests of Yucatan.

People have hardly begun to speculate about the consequences of thereturn of humanity from a closely tethered to a migratory existence. Itis here that the prophet finds his chief opportunity. Obviously, thesegreat forces of transport are already straining against the limits ofexisting political areas. Every country contains now an increasingingredient of unenfranchised Uitlanders. Every country finds a growingsection of its home-born people either living largely abroad, drawingthe bulk of their income from the exterior, and having their essentialinterests wholly or partially across the frontier.

In every locality of a Western European country countless people arefound delocalised, uninterested in the affairs of that particularlocality, and capable of moving themselves with a minimum of loss and amaximum of facility into any other region that proves more attractive.In America political life, especially State life as distinguished fromnational political life, is degraded because of the natural andinevitable apathy of a large portion of the population whose interestsgo beyond the State.

Politicians and statesmen, being the last people in the world to noticewhat is going on in it, are making no attempt whatever to re-adapt thishugely growing floating population of delocalised people to the publicservice. As Mr. Marriott puts it in his novel, "_Now,"_ they "drop out"from politics as we understand politics at present. Local administrationfalls almost entirely--and the decision of Imperial affairs tends moreand more to fall--into the hands of that dwindling and adventurousmoiety which sits tight in one place from the cradle to the grave. Noone has yet invented any method for the political expression andcollective direction of a migratory population, and nobody is attemptingto do so. It is a new problem....

Here, then, is a curious prospect, the prospect of a new kind of people,a floating population going about the world, uprooted, delocalised, andeven, it may be, denationalised, with wide interests and wide views,developing no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of itsown, a philosophy of its own, and yet from the point of view of currentpolitics and legislation unorganised and ineffective.

Most of the forces of international finance and international businessenterprise will be with it. It will develop its own characteristicstandards of art and literature and conduct in accordance with its newnecessities. It is, I believe, the mankind of the future. And the lastthing it will be able to do will be to legislate. The history of theimmediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history ofthe conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions,the boundaries the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditionsestablished during the home-keeping, localised era of mankind's career.

This conflict follows as inevitably upon these new gigantic facilitiesof locomotion as the _Mauretania_ followed from the discoveries of steamand steel.

OF THE NEW REIGN

(_June, 1911_.)

The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets. Already the vastarmy of improvised carpenters that the Coronation has created setthemselves to the work of demolition, and soon every road that convergesupon Central London will be choked again with great loads of timber--butthis time going outward--as our capital emerges from this unprecedentedinundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most statelyof all recorded British Coronations is past.

What new phase in the life of our nation and our Empire does thistremendous ceremony inaugurate? The question is inevitable. There isnothing in all the social existence of men so full of challenge as thecrowning of a king. It is the end of the overture; the curtain rises.This is a new beginning-place for histories.

To us, the great mass of common Englishmen, who have no place in thehierarchy of our land, who do not attend Courts nor encounter uniforms,whose function is at most spectacular, who stand in the street and watchthe dignitaries and the liveries pass by, this sense of criticalexpectation is perhaps greater than it is for those more immediatelyconcerned in the spectacle. They have had their parts to play, theirsymbolic acts to perform, they have sat in their privileged places, andwe have waited at the barriers until their comfort and dignity wasassured. I can conceive many of them, a little fatigued, preparing nowfor social dispersal, relaxing comfortably into gossip, discussing thedetail of these events with an air of things accomplished. They willdecide whether the Coronation has been a success and whether everythinghas or has not passed off very well. For us in the great crowd nothinghas as yet succeeded or passed off well or ill. We are intent upon aKing newly anointed and crowned, a King of whom we know as yet verylittle, but who has, nevertheless, roused such expectation as no Kingbefore him has done since Tudor times, in the presence of giganticopportunities.

There is a conviction widespread among us--his own words, perhaps, havedone most to create it--that King George is inspired, as no recentpredecessor has been inspired, by the conception of kingship, that hisis to be no role of almost indifferent abstinence from the broadprocesses of our national and imperial development. That greater publiclife which is above party and above creed and sect has, we are told,taken hold of his imagination; he is to be no crowned image of unity andcorrelation, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to documents,but an actor in our drama, a living Prince.

Time will test these hopes, but certainly we, the innumerable democracyof individually unimportant men, have felt the need for such a Prince.Our consciousness of defects, of fields of effort untilled, of vastpossibilities neglected and slipping away from us for ever, has neverreally slumbered again since the chastening experiences of the Boer War.Since then the national spirit, hampered though it is by the traditionsof party government and a legacy of intellectual and social heaviness,has been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt against deadness, againststupidity and slackness, against waste and hypocrisy in every departmentof life. We have come to see more and more clearly how little we canhope for from politicians, societies and organised movements in theseessential things. It is this that has invested the energy and manhood,the untried possibilities of the new King with so radiant a light ofhope for us.

Think what it may mean for us all--I write as one of that greatill-informed multitude, sincerely and gravely patriotic, outside theechoes of Court gossip and the easy knowledge of exalted society--if ourKing does indeed care for these wider and profounder things! Suppose wehave a King at last who cares for the advancement of science, who iswilling to do the hundred things that are so easy in his position toincrease research, to honour and to share in scientific thought. Supposewe have a King whose head rises above the level of the Court artist, andwho not only can but will appeal to the latent and discouraged power ofartistic creation in our race. Suppose we have a King who understandsthe need for incessant, acute criticism to keep our collectiveactivities intelligent and efficient, and for a flow of bold, unhamperedthought through every department of the national life, a King liberalwithout laxity and patriotic without pettiness or vulgarity. Such, itseems to us who wait at present almost inexpressively outside theimmediate clamours of a mere artificial loyalty, are the splendidpossibilities of the time.

For England is no exhausted or decaying country. It is rich with anunmeasured capacity for generous responses. It is a country burthenedindeed, but not overwhelmed, by the gigantic responsibilities ofEmpire, a little relaxed by wealth, and hampered rather than enslaved bya certain shyness of temperament, a certain habitual timidity,slovenliness and insincerity of mind. It is a little distrustful ofintellectual power and enterprise, a little awkward and ungracious tobrave and beautiful things, a little too tolerant of dull, well-meaningand industrious men and arrogant old women. It suffers hypocritesgladly, because its criticism is poor, and it is wastefully harsh tofrank unorthodoxy. But its heart is sound if its judgments fall short ofacuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but aquickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of itsrespect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a newquality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in thespring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and suchemancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a Kingalone can give it....

When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to its reckoning, whatwill the sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of thingsvisible? Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it butadd abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and massesof ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradationof the Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeemthe ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find theirfitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape atlast from pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from the foolishcerebrations of university "characters" and eminent politicians atleisure, and our starved science find scope and resources adequate toits gigantic needs? Will our universities, our teaching, our nationaltraining, our public services, gain a new health from the revivingvigour of the national brain? Or is all this a mere wild hope, and shallwe, after perhaps some small flutterings of effort, the foundation ofsome ridiculous little academy of literary busybodies and hangers-on,the public recognition of this or that sociological pretender orfinancial "scientist," and a little polite jobbery with picture-buying,relapse into lassitude and a contented acquiescence in the rivalry ofGermany and the United States for the moral, intellectual and materialleadership of the world?

The deaths and accessions of Kings, the changing of names and coins andsymbols and persons, a little force our minds in the marking off ofepochs. We are brought to weigh one generation against another, toreckon up our position and note the characteristics of a new phase. Whatlies before us in the next decades? Is England going on to freshachievements, to a renewed and increased predominance, or is she fallinginto a secondary position among the peoples of the world?

The answer to that depends upon ourselves. Have we pride enough toattempt still to lead mankind, and if we have, have we the wisdom andthe quality? Or are we just the children of Good Luck, who are beingfound out?

Some years ago our present King exhorted this island to "wake up" in oneof the most remarkable of British royal utterances, and Mr. Owen Seamanassures him in verse of an altogether laureate quality that we are now

"Free of the snare of slumber's silken bands,"

though I have not myself observed it. It is interesting to ask, IsEngland really waking up? and if she is, what sort of awakening is shelikely to have?

It is possible, of course, to wake up in various different ways. Thereis the clear and beautiful dawn of new and balanced effort, easy,unresting, planned, assured, and there is also the blundering-up of astill half-somnolent man, irascible, clumsy, quarrelsome, who stubs histoe in his first walk across the room, smashes his too persistent alarumclock in a fit of nerves, and cuts his throat while shaving. Allpatriotic vehemence does not serve one's country. Exertion is a morecritical and dangerous thing than inaction, and the essence of successis in the ability to develop those qualities which make actioneffective, and without which strenuousness is merely a clumsy and noisyprotest against inevitable defeat. These necessary qualities, withoutwhich no community may hope for pre-eminence to-day, are a passion forfine and brilliant achievement, relentless veracity of thought andmethod, and richly imaginative fearlessness of enterprise. Have weEnglish those qualities, and are we doing our utmost to select anddevelop them?

I doubt very much if we are. Let me give some of the impressions thatqualify my assurance in the future of our race.

I have watched a great deal of patriotic effort during the last decade,I have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for thesake of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effectof lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness andweakness of aim in very much that has been done. I miss continually thatsharply critical imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellentwork, which shines out supremely in Cromwell's creation of the NewModel, or Nelson's plan of action at Trafalgar, as brightly as it doesin Newton's investigation of gravitation, Turner's rendering oflandscape, or Shakespeare's choice of words, but which cannot be absentaltogether if any achievement is to endure. We seem to have busy,energetic people, no doubt, in abundance, patient and industriousadministrators and legislators; but have we any adequate supply ofreally creative ability?

Let me apply this question to one matter upon which England hascertainly been profoundly in earnest during the last decade. We havebeen almost frantically resolved to keep the empire of the sea. But havewe really done all that could have been done? I ask it with alldiffidence, but has our naval preparation been free from a sort of noisyviolence, a certain massive dullness of conception? Have we really madeanything like a sane use of our resources? I do not mean of ourresources in money or stuff. It is manifest that the next naval war willbe beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, giving such scope forinvention and scientifically equipped wit and courage as the world hasnever had before. Now, have we really developed any considerableproportion of the potential human quality available to meet the demandfor wits? What are we doing to discover, encourage and develop thosesupreme qualities of personal genius that become more and more decisivewith every new weapon and every new complication and unsuspectedpossibility it introduces? Suppose, for example, there was among usto-day a one-eyed, one-armed adulterer, rather fragile, prone tosea-sickness, and with just that one supreme quality of imaginativecourage which made Nelson our starry admiral. Would he be given theghost of a chance now of putting that gift at his country's disposal? Ido not think he would, and I do not think he would because we underrategifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickeningappreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvaluethe good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues ofmediocrity.

I have but the knowledge of the man in the street in these things,though once or twice I have chanced on prophecy, and I am uneasilyapprehensive of the quality of all our naval preparations. We go onlaunching these lumping great Dreadnoughts, and I cannot bring myself tobelieve in them. They seem vulnerable from the air above and the deepbelow, vulnerable in a shallow channel and in a fog (and the North Seais both foggy and shallow), and immensely costly. If I were Lord HighAdmiral of England at war I would not fight the things. I would as soonput to sea in St. Paul's Cathedral. If I were fighting Germany, I wouldstow half of them away in the Clyde and half in the Bristol Channel, andtake the good men out of them and fight with mines and torpedoes anddestroyers and airships and submarines.

And when I come to military matters my persuasion that things are notall right, that our current hostility to imaginative activity and ourdull acceptance of established methods and traditions is leading ustowards grave dangers, intensifies. In South Africa the Boers taught usin blood and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had itsmilitary uses, and over the high passes on the way to Lhassa (though,luckily, it led to no disaster) there was not a rifle in condition touse because we had not thought to take glycerine. The perpetual noveltyof modern conditions demands an imaginative alertness we eliminate. I donot believe that the Army Council or anyone in authority has worked outa tithe of the essential problems of contemporary war. If they have,then it does not show. Our military imagination is half-way back to bowsand arrows. The other day I saw a detachment of the Legion ofFrontiersmen disporting itself at Totteridge. I presume these youngheroes consider they are preparing for a possible conflict in England orWestern Europe, and I presume the authorities are satisfied with them.It is at any rate the only serious war of which there is any manifestprobability. Western Europe is now a network of railways, tramways, highroads, wires of all sorts; its chief beasts of burthen are the railwaytrain and the motor car and the bicycle; towns and hypertrophiedvillages are often practically continuous over large areas; there isabundant water and food, and the commonest form of cover is the house.But the Legion of Frontiersmen is equipped for war, oh!--in Arizona in1890, and so far as I am able to judge the most modern sections of thearmy extant are organised for a colonial war in (say) 1899 or 1900.There is, of course, a considerable amount of vague energy demandingconscription and urging our youth towards a familiarity with arms andthe backwoodsman's life, but of any thought-out purpose in our armingwidely understood, of any realisation of what would have to be done andwhere it would have to be done, and of any attempts to create aninstrument for that novel unprecedented undertaking, I discover notrace.

In my capacity of devil's advocate pleading against nationalover-confidence, I might go on to the quality of our social andpolitical movements. One hears nowadays a vast amount of chatter aboutefficiency--that magic word--and social organisation, and there is nodoubt a huge expenditure of energy upon these things and a widespreaddesire to rush about and make showy and startling changes. But it doesnot follow that this involves progress if the enterprise itself is dullyconceived and most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In theabsence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person mayset up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentionsat large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert"quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in adull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs multiply indarkness and heat.

I find the same doubts of our quality assail me when I turn to thesupreme business of education. It is true we all seem alive nowadays tothe need of education, are all prepared for more expenditure upon it andmore, but it does not follow necessarily in a period of stagnatingimagination that we shall get what we pay for. The other day Idiscovered my little boy doing a subtraction sum, and I found he wasdoing it in a slower, clumsier, less businesslike way than the one I wastaught in an old-fashioned "Commercial Academy" thirty odd years ago.The educational "expert," it seems, has been at work substituting a badmethod for a good one in our schools because it is easier of exposition.The educational "expert," in the lack of a lively public intelligence,develops all the vices of the second-rate energetic, and he is, I amonly too disposed to believe, making a terrible mess of a great deal ofour science teaching and of the teaching of mathematics and English....

I have written enough to make clear the quality of my doubts. I thinkthe English mind cuts at life with a dulled edge, and that its energymay be worse than its somnolence. I think it undervalues gifts and fineachievement, and overvalues the commonplace virtues of mediocre men. Oneof the greatest Liberal statesmen in the time of Queen Victoria neverheld office because he was associated with a divorce case a quarter of acentury ago. For him to have taken office would have been regarded as ascandal. But it is not regarded as a scandal that our Governmentincludes men of no more ability than any average assistant behind agrocer's counter. These are your gods, O England!--and with every desireto be optimistic I find it hard under the circumstances to anticipatethat the New Epoch is likely to be a blindingly brilliant time for ourEmpire and our race.

WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE?

What will hold such an Empire as the British together, this great, laxlyscattered, sea-linked association of ancient states and new-formedcountries, Oriental nations, and continental colonies? What will enableit to resist the endless internal strains, the inevitable externalpressures and attacks to which it must be subjected This is the primaryquestion for British Imperialism; everything else is secondary orsubordinated to that.

There is a multitude of answers. But I suppose most of them will proveunder examination either to be, or to lead to, or to imply verydistinctly this generalisation that if most of the intelligent andactive people in the Empire want it to continue it will, and that if alarge proportion of such active and intelligent people are discontentedand estranged, nothing can save it from disintegration. I do not supposethat a navy ten times larger than ours, or conscription of the mostirksome thoroughness, could oblige Canada to remain in the Empire if thegeneral will and feeling of Canada were against it, or coerce India intoa sustained submission if India presented a united and resistant front.Our Empire, for all its roll of battles, was not created by force;colonisation and diplomacy have played a far larger share in its growththan conquest; and there is no such strength in its sovereignty as therule of pride and pressure demand. It is to the free consent andparticipation of its constituent peoples that we must look for itscontinuance.

A large and influential body of politicians considers that inpreferential trading between the parts of the Empire, and in theerection of a tariff wall against exterior peoples, lies the secret ofthat deepened emotional understanding we all desire. I have neverbelonged to that school. I am no impassioned Free Trader--the sacredprinciple of Free Trade has always impressed me as a piece of partyclaptrap; but I have never been able to understand how an attempt todraw together dominions so scattered and various as ours by a network offiscal manipulation could end in anything but mutual inconveniencemutual irritation, and disruption.

In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me now a crumpled cardon which are the notes I made of a former discussion of this very issue,a discussion between a number of prominent politicians in the daysbefore Mr. Chamberlain's return from South Africa and the adoption ofTariff Reform by the Unionist Party; and I decipher again the sameconsiderations, unanswered and unanswerable, that leave me scepticalto-day.

Take a map of the world and consider the extreme differences in positionand condition between our scattered states. Here is Canada, lying alongthe United States, looking eastward to Japan and China, westward to allEurope. See the great slashes of lake, bay, and mountain chain that cutit meridianally. Obviously its main routes and trades and relations lienaturally north and south; obviously its full development can only beattained with those ways free, open, and active. Conceivably, you maybuild a fiscal wall across the continent; conceivably, you may shut offthe east and half the west by impossible tariffs, and narrow its tradeto one artificial duct to England, but only at the price of a hampereddevelopment It will be like nourishing the growing body of a man withthe heart and arteries of a mouse.

Then here, again, are New Zealand and Australia, facing South Americaand the teeming countries of Eastern Asia; surely it is in relation tothese vast proximities that their economic future lies. Is it possibleto believe that shipping mutton to London is anything but the merebeginning of their commercial development Look at India, again, andSouth Africa. Is it not manifest that from the economic and businesspoints of view each of these is an entirely separate entity, a systemapart, under distinct necessities, needing entire freedom to make itsown bargains and control its trade in its own way in order to achieveits fullest material possibilities?

Nor can I believe that financial entanglements greatly strengthen thebonds of an empire in any case. We lost the American colonies because weinterfered with their fiscal arrangements, and it was Napoleon's attemptto strangle the Continental trade with Great Britain that began hisdownfall.

I do not find in the ordinary relations of life that business relationsnecessarily sustain intercourse. The relations of buyer and seller areticklish relations, very liable to strains and conflicts. I do not findpeople grow fond of their butchers and plumbers, and I doubt whether ifone were obliged by some special taxation to deal only with one butcheror one plumber, it would greatly endear the relationship. Forced buyingis irritated buying, and it is the forbidden shop that contains thecoveted goods. Nor do I find, to take another instance, among the hotelstaffs of Switzerland and the Riviera--who live almost entirely uponBritish gold--those impassioned British imperialist views the economiclink theory would lead me to expect.

And another link, too, upon which much stress is laid but about which Ihave very grave doubts, is the possibility of a unified organisation ofthe Empire for military defence. We are to have, it is suggested, animperial Army and an imperial Navy, and so far, no doubt, as theguaranteeing of a general peace goes, we may develop a sense ofparticipation in that way. But it is well in these islands to rememberthat our extraordinary Empire has no common enemy to weld it togetherfrom without.

It is too usual to regard Germany as the common enemy. We in GreatBritain are now intensely jealous of Germany. We are intensely jealousof Germany not only because the Germans outnumber us, and have a muchlarger and more diversified country than ours, and lie in the very heartand body of Europe, but because in the last hundred years, while we havefed on platitudes and vanity, they have had the energy and humility todevelop a splendid system of national education, to toil at science andart and literature, to develop social organisation, to master and betterour methods of business and industry, and to clamber above us in thescale of civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather thanchastened us, and our irritation has been greatly exacerbated by theswaggering bad manners, the talk of "Blood and Iron" and Mailed Fists,the Welt-Politik rubbish that inaugurated the new German phase.

The British middle-class, therefore, is full of an angry, vaguedisposition to thwart that expansion which Germans regard veryreasonably as their natural destiny; there are all the possibilities ofa huge conflict in that disposition, and it is perhaps well to rememberhow insular--or, at least, how European--the essentials of this quarrelare. We have lost our tempers, but Canada has not. There is nothing inGermany to make Canada envious and ashamed of wasted years. Canada hasno natural quarrel with Germany, nor has India, nor South Africa, norAustralasia. They have no reason to share our insular exasperation. Onthe other hand, all these states have other special preoccupations. NewZealand, for example, having spent half a century and more insheep-farming, land legislation, suppressing its drink traffic, loweringits birth-rate, and, in short, the achievement of an ideal preventivematerialism, is chiefly consumed by hate and fear of Japan, which in thesame interval has made a stride from the thirteenth to the twentiethcentury, and which teems with art and life and enterprise and offspring.Now Japan in Welt-Politik is our ally.

You see, the British Empire has no common economic interests and nonatural common enemy. It is not adapted to any form of Zollverein or anyform of united aggression. Visibly, on the map of the world it has alikeness to open hands, while the German Empire--except for a fewill-advised and imitative colonies--is clenched into a central Europeanunity.

Physically, our Empire is incurably scattered, various, and divided, andit is to quite other links and forces, it seems to me, than fiscal ormilitary unification that we who desire its continuance must look tohold it together. There never was anything like it before. Essentiallyit is an adventure of the British spirit, sanguine, discursive, andbeyond comparison insubordinate, adaptable, and originating. It has beenmade by odd and irregular means by trading companies, pioneers,explorers, unauthorised seamen, adventurers like Clive, eccentrics likeGordon, invalids like Rhodes. It has been made, in spite of authorityand officialdom, as no other empire was ever made. The nominal rulers ofBritain never planned it. It happened almost in spite of them. Theirchief contribution to its history has been the loss of the UnitedStates. It is a living thing that has arisen, not a dead thing puttogether. Beneath the thin legal and administrative ties that hold ittogether lies the far more vital bond of a traditional free spontaneousactivity. It has a common medium of expression in the English tongue, aunity of liberal and tolerant purpose amidst its enormous variety oflocalised life and colour. And it is in the development andstrengthening, the enrichment the rendering more conscious and morepurposeful, of that broad creative spirit of the British that the truecement and continuance of our Empire is to be found.

The Empire must live by the forces that begot it. It cannot hope to giveany such exclusive prosperity as a Zollverein might afford; it can holdout no hopes of collective conquests and triumphs--its utmost militaryrole must be the guaranteeing of a common inaggressive security; but itcan, if it is to survive, it must, give all its constituent parts such acivilisation as none of them could achieve alone, a civilisation, awealth and fullness of life increasing and developing with the years.Through that, and that alone, can it be made worth having and worthserving.

And in the first place the whole Empire must use the English language.I do not mean that any language must be stamped out, that a thousandlanguages may not flourish by board and cradle and in folk-songs andvillage gossip--Erse, the Taal, a hundred Indian and other Easterntongues, Canadian French--but I mean that also English must beavailable, that everywhere there must be English teaching. And everyonewho wants to read science or history or philosophy, to come out of thevillage life into wider thoughts and broader horizons, to gainappreciation in art, must find ready to hand, easily attainable inEnglish, all there is to know and all that has been said thereon. It isworth a hundred Dreadnoughts and a million soldiers to the Empire, thatwherever the imperial posts reach, wherever there is a curious orreceptive mind, there in English and by the imperial connection the fullthought of the race should come. To the lonely youth upon the NewZealand sheep farm, to the young Hindu, to the trapper under a Labradortilt, to the half-breed assistant at a Burmese oil-well, to theself-educating Scottish miner or the Egyptian clerk, the Empire and theEnglish language should exist, visibly and certainly, as the media bywhich his spirit escapes from his immediate surroundings and all theurgencies of every day, into a limitless fellowship of thought andbeauty.

Now I am not writing this in any vague rhetorical way; I meanspecifically that our Empire has to become the medium of knowledge andthought to every intelligent person in it, or that it is bound to go topieces. It has no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity.Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose andoutlook. If it is not held together by thought and spirit, it cannot beheld together. No other cement exists that can hold it togetherindefinitely.

Not only English literature, but all other literatures well translatedinto English, and all science and all philosophy, have to be broughtwithin the reach of everyone capable of availing himself of suchreading. And this must be done, not by private enterprise or for gain,but as an Imperial function. Wherever the Empire extends there itspresence must signify all that breadth of thought and outlook nolocalised life can supply.

Only so is it possible to establish and maintain the wideunderstandings, the common sympathy necessary to our continuedassociation. The Empire, mediately or immediately, must become theuniversal educator, news-agent, book-distributor, civiliser-general, andvehicle of imaginative inspiration for its peoples, or else it mustsubmit to the gravitation of its various parts to new and moreinvigorating associations.

No empire, it may be urged, has ever attempted anything of this sort,but no empire like the British has ever yet existed. Its conditions andneeds are unprecedented, its consolidation is a new problem, to besolved, if it is solved at all, by untried means. And in the Englishlanguage as a vehicle of thought and civilisation alone is that means tobe found.

Now it is idle to pretend that at the present time the British Empire isgiving its constituent peoples any such high and rewarding civilisationas I am here suggesting. It gives them a certain immunity from warfare,a penny post, an occasional spectacular coronation, a few knighthoodsand peerages, and the services of an honest, unsympathetic,narrow-minded, and unattractive officialism. No adequate effort isbeing made to render the English language universal throughout itslimits, none at all to use it as a medium of thought and enlightenment.Half the good things of the human mind are outside English altogether,and there is not sufficient intelligence among us to desire to bringthem in. If one would read honest and able criticism, one must learnFrench; if one would be abreast of scientific knowledge andphilosophical thought, or see many good plays or understand thecontemporary European mind, German.

And yet it would cost amazingly little to get every good foreign thingdone into English as it appeared. It needs only a little understandingand a little organisation to ensure the immediate translation of everysignificant article, every scientific paper of the slightest value. Theeffort and arrangement needed to make books, facilities for research,and all forms of art accessible throughout the Empire, would bealtogether trivial in proportion to the consolidation it would effect.

But English people do not understand these things. Their Empire is anaccident. It was made for them by their exceptional and outcast men, andin the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness oftheir commonplace and dull-minded leaders. Empire has happened to themand civilisation has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tamerabbits. They do not understand how they got, and they will notunderstand how to keep. Art, thought, literature, all indeed that raisesmen above locality and habit, all that can justify and consolidate theEmpire, is nothing to them. They are provincials mocked by a world-wideopportunity, the stupid legatees of a great generation of exiles. Theygo out of town for the "shootin'," and come back for the fooleries ofParliament, and to see what the Censor has left of our playwrights andSir Jesse Boot of our writers, and to dine in restaurants and wearclothes.

Mostly they call themselves Imperialists, which is just their harmlessway of expressing their satisfaction with things as they are. Inpractice their Imperialism resolves itself into a vigorous resistance totaxation and an ill-concealed hostility to education. It matters nothingto them that the whole next generation of Canadians has drawn its ideasmainly from American publications, that India and Egypt, in despite ofsounder mental nourishment, have developed their own vernacular Press,that Australia and New Zealand even now gravitate to America for booksand thought. It matters nothing to them that the poverty and insularityof our intellectual life has turned American art to France and Italy,and the American universities towards Germany. The slow starvation anddecline of our philosophy and science, the decadence of Britishinvention and enterprise, troubles them not at all, because they fail toconnect these things with the tangible facts of empire. "The worldcannot wait for the English." ... And the sands of our Imperialopportunity twirl through the neck of the hour-glass.

THE LABOUR UNREST

(_May, 1912_.)

Sec. 1

Our country is, I think, in a dangerous state of social disturbance. Thediscontent of the labouring mass of the community is deep andincreasing. It may be that we are in the opening phase of a real andirreparable class war.

Since the Coronation we have moved very rapidly indeed from an assuranceof extreme social stability towards the recognition of a spreadingdisorganisation. It is idle to pretend any longer that these Labourtroubles are the mere give and take of economic adjustment. Noadjustment is in progress. New and strange urgencies are at work in ourmidst, forces for which the word "revolutionary" is only too faithfullyappropriate. Nothing is being done to allay these forces; everythingconspires to exasperate them.

Whither are these forces taking us? What can still be done and what hasto be done to avoid the phase of social destruction to which we seem tobe drifting?

Hitherto, in Great Britain at any rate, the working man has shownhimself a being of the most limited and practical outlook. Hisnarrowness of imagination, his lack of general ideas, has been thedespair of the Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist. Hemay have struck before, but only for definite increments of wages ordefinite limitations of toil; his acceptance of the industrial systemand its methods has been as complete and unquestioning as his acceptanceof earth and sky. Now, with an effect of suddenness, this ceases to bethe case. A new generation of workers is seen replacing the old, workersof a quality unfamiliar to the middle-aged and elderly men who stillmanage our great businesses and political affairs. The worker isbeginning now to strike for unprecedented ends--against the system,against the fundamental conditions of labour, to strike for no definedends at all, perplexingly and disconcertingly. The old-fashioned strikewas a method of bargaining, clumsy and violent perhaps, but bargainingstill; the new-fashioned strike is far less of a haggle, far more of adisplay of temper. The first thing that has to be realised if the Labourquestion is to be understood at all is this, that the temper of Labourhas changed altogether in the last twenty or thirty years. Essentiallythat is a change due to intelligence not merely increased but greatlystimulated, to the work, that is, of the board schools and of the cheapPress. The outlook of the workman has passed beyond the works and hisbeer and his dog. He has become--or, rather, he has been replaced by--abeing of eyes, however imperfect, and of criticism, however hasty andunjust. The working man of to-day reads, talks, has general ideas and asense of the round world; he is far nearer to the ruler of to-day inknowledge and intellectual range than he is to the working man of fiftyyears ago. The politician or business magnate of to-day is no bettereducated and very little better informed than his equals were fiftyyears ago. The chief difference is golf. The working man questions athousand things his father accepted as in the very nature of the world,and among others he begins to ask with the utmost alertness andpersistence why it is that he in particular is expected to toil. Theanswer, the only justifiable answer, should be that that is the work forwhich he is fitted by his inferior capacity and culture, that theseothers are a special and select sort, very specially trained andprepared for their responsibilities, and that at once brings this newfact of a working-class criticism of social values into play. The oldworkman might and did quarrel very vigorously with his specificemployer, but he never set out to arraign all employers; he took the lawand the Church and Statecraft and politics for the higher and noblethings they claimed to be. He wanted an extra shilling or he wanted anhour of leisure, and that was as much as he wanted. The young workman,on the other hand, has put the whole social system upon its trial, andseems quite disposed to give an adverse verdict. He looks far beyond theolder conflict of interests between employer and employed. He criticisesthe good intentions of the whole system of governing and influentialpeople, and not only their good intentions, but their ability. These arethe new conditions, and the middle-aged and elderly gentlemen who aredealing with the crisis on the supposition that their vast experience ofLabour questions in the 'seventies and 'eighties furnishes valuableguidance in this present issue are merely bringing the gunpowder ofmisapprehension to the revolutionary fort.

The workman of the new generation is full of distrust the mostdemoralising of social influences. He is like a sailor who believes nolonger either in the good faith or seamanship of his captain, and,between desperation and contempt, contemplates vaguely but persistentlythe assumption of control by a collective forecastle. He is like aprivate soldier obsessed with the idea that nothing can save thesituation but the death of an incompetent officer. His distrust is soprofound that he ceases not only to believe in the employer, but heceases to believe in the law, ceases to believe in Parliament, as ameans to that tolerable life he desires; and he falls back steadily uponhis last resource of a strike, and--if by repressive tactics we make itso--a criminal strike. The central fact of all this present trouble isthat distrust. There is only one way in which our present drift towardsrevolution or revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is byrestoring the confidence of these alienated millions, who visibly noware changing from loyalty to the Crown, from a simple patriotism, fromhabitual industry, to the more and more effective expression of adeepening resentment.

This is a psychological question, a matter of mental states. Feats oflegal subtlety are inopportune, arithmetical exploits still more so. Toemerge with the sum of 4s. 6-1/2d. as a minimum, by calculating on thebasis of the mine's present earnings, from a conference which the minersand everybody else imagined was to give a minimum of 5s., may be clever,but it is certainly not politic in the present stage of Labour feeling.To stamp violently upon obscure newspapers nobody had heard of beforeand send a printer to prison, and to give thereby a flamingadvertisement to the possible use of soldiers in civil conflicts and setevery barrack-room talking, may be permissible, but it is certainly veryill-advised. The distrust deepens.

The real task before a governing class that means to go on governing isnot just at present to get the better of an argument or the best of abargain, but to lay hold of the imaginations of this drifting, sullenand suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country. Whatwe prosperous people, who have nearly all the good things of life andmost of the opportunity, have to do now is to justify ourselves. We haveto show that we are indeed responsible and serviceable, willing to giveourselves, and to give ourselves generously for what we have and what wehave had. We have to meet the challenge of this distrust.

The slack days for rulers and owners are over. If there are still to berulers and owners and managing and governing people, then in the face ofthe new masses, sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as nocommon people have ever been before, these rulers and owners must beprepared to make themselves and display themselves wise, capable andheroic--beyond any aristocratic precedent. The alternative, if it is analternative, is resignation--to the Social Democracy.

And it is just because we are all beginning to realise the immense needfor this heroic quality in those who rule and are rich and powerful, asthe response and corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that arethreatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have all followedthe details of this great catastrophe in the Atlantic with such intensesolicitude. It was one of those accidents that happen with a precisionof time and circumstance that outdoes art; not an incident in it allthat was not supremely typical. It was the penetrating comment of chanceupon our entire social situation. Beneath a surface of magnificentefficiency was--slap-dash. The third-class passengers had placedthemselves on board with an infinite confidence in the care that was tobe taken of them, and they went down, and most of their women andchildren went down with the cry of those who find themselves cheated outof life.

In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmenand engineers--persons of the trade-union class--who shine as brightlyas any. And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the lot of thattragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to becaught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment. Nountried man dare say that he would have behaved better in his place. Heescaped. He thought it natural to escape. His class thinks it was rightand proper that he did escape. It is not the man I would criticise, butthe manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme dignity of hisposition as would have sustained him in that crisis. He was a rich manand a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man. In the commonman's realisation that such is indeed the case with most of those whodominate our world, lies the true cause and danger of our socialindiscipline. And the remedy in the first place lies not in sociallegislation and so forth, but in the consciences of the wealthy. Heroismand a generous devotion to the common good are the only effective answerto distrust. If such dominating people cannot produce these qualitiesthere will have to be an end to them, and the world must turn to someentirely different method of direction.

Sec. 2

The essential trouble in our growing Labour disorder is the profounddistrust which has grown up in the minds of the new generation ofworkers of either the ability or the good faith of the property owning,ruling and directing class. I do not attempt to judge the justice or notof this distrust; I merely point to its existence as one of the strikingand essential factors in the contemporary Labour situation.

This distrust is not, perhaps, the proximate cause of the strikes thatnow follow each other so disconcertingly, but it embitters their spirit,it prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have triedto suggest that, whatever immediate devices for pacification might beemployed, the only way to a better understanding and co-operation, theonly escape from a social slide towards the unknown possibilities ofSocial Democracy, lies in an exaltation of the standard of achievementand of the sense of responsibility in the possessing and governingclasses. It is not so much "Wake up, England!" that I would say as "Wakeup, gentlemen!"--for the new generation of the workers is beyond allquestion quite alarmingly awake and critical and angry. And they havenot merely to wake up, they have to wake up visibly and ostentatiouslyif those old class reliances on which our system is based are to bepreserved and restored.

We need before anything else a restoration of class confidence. It is atime when class should speak with class very frankly.

There is too much facile misrepresentation, too ready a disposition oneither side to accept caricatures as portraits and charges as facts.However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind ofLabour, this young, restive Labour of the twentieth century, which canread, discuss and combine, we need something in the nature of a socialcontract. And it is when one comes to consider by what possible meansthese suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and imperilledsocial liner can be brought into generous co-operation with the secondand the first that one discovers just how lamentably out of date and outof order our political institutions, which should supply the means forjust this inter-class discussion, have become. Between the busy andpreoccupied owning and employing class on the one hand, and thedistressed, uneasy masses on the other, intervenes the professionalpolitician, not as a mediator, but as an obstacle, who must bepropitiated before any dealings are possible. Our national politics nolonger express the realities of the national life; they are a mereimpediment in the speech of the community. With our whole social orderin danger, our Legislature is busy over the trivial little affairs ofthe Welsh Established Church, whose endowment probably is not equal tothe fortune of any one of half a dozen _Titanic_ passengers or a titheof the probable loss of another strike among the miners. We have aLegislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of Gladstonianlegacies rather than governing our world to-day.

Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law'sconsequence, and, with us at least, the legal profession is thepolitical profession. It delights in false issues and merely technicalpolitics. Steadily with the ascendancy of the House of Commons thebarristers have ousted other types of men from political power. Thedecline of the House of Lords has been the last triumph of the House ofLawyers, and we are governed now to a large extent not so much by thepeople for the people as by the barristers for the barristers. They setthe tone of political life. And since they are the most specialised, themost specifically trained of all the professions, since their trainingis absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructiveartist and the controlled experiments of the scientific man, since thebusiness is with evidence and advantages and the skilful use of evidenceand advantages, and not with understanding, they are the leaststatesmanlike of all educated men, and they give our public life a toneas hopelessly discordant with our very great and urgent social needs asone could well imagine. They do not want to deal at all with great andurgent social needs. They play a game, a long and interesting game, withparties as sides, a game that rewards the industrious player withprominence, place, power and great rewards, and the less that gameinvolves the passionate interests of other men, the less it draws theminto participation and angry interference, the better for the steadydevelopment of the politician's career. A distinguished and activefruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he found it, is thepolitical barrister's ideal career. To achieve that, he must maintainlegal and political monopolies, and prevent the invasion of politicallife by living interests. And so far as he has any views about Labourbeyond the margin of his brief, the barrister politician seems to regardgetting men back to work on any terms and as soon as possible as thehighest good.

And it is with such men that our insurgent modern Labour, with itsvaguely apprehended wants, its large occasions and its rapid emotionalreactions, comes into contact directly it attempts to adjust itself inthe social body. It is one of the main factors in the progressiveembitterment of the Labour situation that whatever business isafoot--arbitration, conciliation, inquiry--our contemporary systempresents itself to Labour almost invariably in a legal guise. Thenatural infirmities of humanity rebel against an unimaginative legalityof attitude, and the common workaday man has no more love for this greatand necessary profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade.Little reasonable things from the lawyers' point of view--the rejection,for example, of certain evidence in the _Titanic_ inquiry because itmight amount to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption andchecking of a Labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivialpoints--irritate quite disproportionately.

Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and it is a very gravenational misfortune that at this time, when our situation calls aloudfor statecraft and a certain greatness of treatment, our public lifeshould be dominated as it has never been dominated before by this mostable and illiberal profession.

Now for that great multitude of prosperous people who find themselves atonce deeply concerned in our present social and economic crisis, andeither helplessly entangled in party organisation or helplessly outsidepolitics, the elimination and cure of this disease of statecraft, theprofessional politician, has become a very urgent matter. To destroyhim, to get him back to his law courts and keep him there, it isnecessary to destroy the machinery of the party system that sustainshim, and to adopt some electoral method that will no longer put theindependent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against theparty nominee. Such a method is to be found in proportionalrepresentation with large constituencies, and to that we must look forour ultimate liberation from our present masters, these politicianbarristers. But the Labour situation cannot wait for this millennialrelease, and for the current issue it seems to me patent that everyreasonable prosperous man will, even at the cost to himself of sometrouble and hard thinking, do his best to keep as much of this great andacute controversy as he possibly can out of the lawyer's and merepolitician's hands and in his own. Leave Labour to the lawyers, and weshall go very deeply into trouble indeed before this business is over.They will score their points, they will achieve remarkable agreementsfull of the possibility of subsequent surprises, they will makereputations, and do everything Heaven and their professional traininghave made them to do, and they will exasperate and exasperate!

Lawyers made the first French Revolution, and now, on a different side,they may yet bring about an English one. These men below there arestill, as a class, wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared totake orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom and nobility. Theymake the most reasonable claims for a tolerable life, for certainassurances and certain latitudes. Implicit rather than expressed istheir demand for wisdom and right direction from those to whom the greatsurplus and freedom of civilisation are given. It is an entirelyreasonable demand if man is indeed a social animal. But we have got totreat them fairly and openly. This patience and reasonableness andwillingness for leadership is not limitless. It is no good scoring ourmean little points, for example, and accusing them of breach of contractand all sorts of theoretical wrongs because they won't abide byagreements to accept a certain scale of wages when the purchasing powerof money has declined. When they made that agreement they did not thinkof that possibility. When they said a pound they thought of what wasthen a poundsworth of living. The Mint has since been increasing itsannual output of gold coins to two or three times the former amount, andwe have, as it were, debased the coinage with extraordinary quantitiesof gold. But we who know and own did nothing to adjust that; we did nottell the working man of that; we have let him find it out slowly andindirectly at the grocer's shop. That may be permissible from thelawyer's point of view, but it certainly isn't from the gentleman's, andit is only by the plea that its inequalities give society a gentlemanthat our present social system can claim to endure.

I would like to accentuate that, because if we are to emerge again fromthese acute social dissensions a reunited and powerful people, there hasto be a change of tone, a new generosity on the part of those who dealwith Labour speeches, Labour literature, Labour representatives, andLabour claims. Labour is necessarily at an enormous disadvantage indiscussion; in spite of a tremendous inferiority in training andeducation it is trying to tell the community its conception of its needsand purposes. It is not only young as a participator in the discussionof affairs; it is actually young. The average working man is not halfthe age of the ripe politicians and judges and lawyers and wealthyorganisers who trip him up legally, accuse him of bad faith, mark hisevery inconsistency. It isn't becoming so to use our forensicadvantages. It isn't--if that has no appeal to you--wise.

The thing our society has most to fear from Labour is not organisedresistance, not victorious strikes and raised conditions, but the blackresentment that follows defeat. Meet Labour half-way, and you will finda new co-operation in government; stick to your legal rights, draw thenet of repressive legislation tighter, then you will presently have todeal with Labour enraged. If the anger burns free, that meansrevolution; if you crush out the hope of that, then sabotage and asullen general sympathy for anarchistic crime.

Sec. 3

In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the presentLabour situation. I have tried to show the profound significance in thisdiscussion of the distrust which has grown up in the minds of theworkers, and how this distrust is being exacerbated by our entirely tooforensic method of treating their claims. I want now to point out astill more powerful set of influences which is steadily turning ourLabour struggles from mere attempts to adjust hours and wages intomovements that are gravely and deliberately revolutionary.

This is the obvious devotion of a large and growing proportion of thetime and energy of the owning and ruling classes to pleasure andexcitement, and the way in which this spectacle of amusement andadventure is now being brought before the eyes and into the imaginationof the working man.

The intimate psychology of work is a thing altogether too littleconsidered and discussed. One asks: "What keeps a workman workingproperly at his work?" and it seems a sufficient answer to say that itis the need of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer.Work must to some extent interest; if it bores, no power on earth willkeep a man doing it properly. And the tendency of modern industrialismhas been to subdivide processes and make work more boring and irksome.Also the workman must be satisfied with the living he is getting, andthe tendency of newspaper, theatre, cinematograph show and so forth isto fill his mind with ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeableand interesting than his own. Habit also counts very largely in theregular return of the man to his job, and the fluctuations ofemployment, the failure of the employing class to provide anyalternative to idleness during slack time, break that habit of industry.And then, last but not least, there is self-respect. Men and women arecapable of wonders of self-discipline and effort if they feel thattheirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine the thing they aredoing is the thing they ought to do. A miner will cut coal in adifferent spirit and with a fading zest if he knows his day's output isto be burnt to waste secretly by a lunatic. Man is a social animal; fewmen are naturally social rebels, and most will toil very cheerfully insubordination if they feel that the collective end is a fine thing and agreat thing.

Now, this force of self-respect is much more acutely present in the mindof the modern worker than it was in the thought of his fathers. He isintellectually more active than his predecessors, his imagination isrelatively stimulated, he asks wide questions. The worker of a formergeneration took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilersbegin to ask, not one man here or there, but in masses, in battalions,in trades: "Why, then, are _we_ toilers, and for what is it that wetoil?"

What answer do we give them?

I ask the reader to put himself in the place of a good workman, a young,capable miner, let us say, in search of an answer to that question. Heis, we will suppose, temporarily unemployed through the production of aglut of coal, and he goes about the world trying to see the fine andnoble collective achievements that justify the devotion of his wholelife to humble toil. I ask the reader: What have we got to show thatman? What are we doing up in the light and air that justifies our demandthat he should go on hewing in narrow seams and cramped corners until hecan hew no more? Where is he to be taken to see these crowning fruits ofour release from toil? Shall we take him to the House of Commons to notewhich of the barristers is making most headway over WelshDisestablishment, or shall we take him to the _Titanic_ inquiry to hearthe latest about those fifty-five third-class children (out ofeighty-three) who were drowned? Shall we give him an hour or so amongthe portraits at the Royal Academy, or shall we make an enthusiastictour of London sculpture and architecture and saturate his soul with thebeauty he makes possible? The new Automobile Club, for example. "Withoutyou and your subordination we could not have had that." Or suppose wetook him the round of the West-End clubs and restaurants and made himestimate how many dinners London can produce at a pinch at the price ofhis local daily minimum, say, and upward; or borrow an aeroplane atHendon and soar about counting all the golfers in the Home Counties onany week-day afternoon. "You suffer at the roots of things, far belowthere, but see all this nobility and splendour, these sweet, brightflowers to which your rootlet life contributes." Or we might spend apleasant morning trying to get a passable woman's hat for the price ofhis average weekly wages in some West-End shop....

But indeed this thing is actually happening. The older type of miner wasilliterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if hehad any intellectual and spiritual urgencies in him beyond eating anddrinking and dog-fighting, the local little Bethel shunted them awayfrom any effective social criticism. The new generation of miners is onan altogether different basis. It is at once less brutal and lessspiritual; it is alert, informed, sceptical, and the Press, withphotographic illustrations, the cinema, and a score of collateralforces, are giving it precisely that spectacular view of luxury,amusement, aimlessness and excitement, taunting it with just thatsuggestion that it is for that, and that alone, that the worker's backaches and his muscles strain. Whatever gravity and spaciousness of aimthere may be in our prosperous social life does not appear to him. Hesees, and he sees all the more brightly because he is looking at it outof toil and darkness, the glitter, the delight for delight's sake, theshow and the pride and the folly. Cannot you understand how it is thatthese young men down there in the hot and dangerous and toilsome andinglorious places of life are beginning to cry out, "We are being madefools of," and to fling down their tools, and cannot you see how futileit is to dream that Mr. Asquith or some other politician by some trickof a Conciliation Act or some claptrap of Compulsory Arbitration, orthat any belated suppression of discussion and strike organisations bythe law, will avert this gathering storm? The Spectacle of Pleasure, theparade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and vanity in the sightof the workers is the culminating irritant of Labour. So long as thatgoes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombreresolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently atwork, will gather strength. It does not matter that such a resolve ishopeless and unseasonable; we are dealing here with the profounderimpulses that underlie reason. Crush this resentment; it will recur withaccumulated strength.

It does not matter that there is no plan in existence for any kind ofsocial order that could be set up in the place of our present system; noplan, that is, that will endure half an hour's practical criticism. Thecardinal fact before us is that the workers do not intend to standthings as they are, and that no clever arguments, no expert handling oflegal points, no ingenious appearances of concession, will stay thatprogressive embitterment.

But I think I have said enough to express and perhaps convey myconviction that our present Labour troubles are unprecedented, and thatthey mean the end of an epoch. The supply of good-tempered, cheaplabour--upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort iserected--is giving out. The spread of information and the means ofpresentation in every class and the increase of luxury andself-indulgence in the prosperous classes are the chief cause of that.In the place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort of labour,reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement hasalready gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coercethe workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to aseries of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorderculminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now formuch longer upon the old lines; our civilisation, if it is not to enterupon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to thenew conditions of which the first and foremost is that the wages-earninglabouring class as a distinctive class, consenting to a distinctivetreatment and accepting life at a disadvantage is going to disappear.Whether we do it soon as the result of our reflections upon the presentsituation, or whether we do it presently through the impoverishment thatmust necessarily result from a lengthening period of industrial unrest,there can be little doubt that we are going to curtail very considerablythe current extravagance of the spending and directing classes uponfood, clothing, display, and all the luxuries of life. The phase ofaffluence is over. And unless we are to be the mere passive spectatorsof an unprecedented reduction of our lives, all of us who have leisureand opportunity have to set ourselves very strenuously to the problemnot of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that possibilityis over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those whoseem to be definitely decided not to remain wage-earners for very muchlonger. We have, as sensible people, to realise that the old arrangementwhich has given us of the fortunate minority so much leisure, luxury,and abundance, advantages we have as a class put to so vulgar andunprofitable a use, is breaking down, and that we have to discover anew, more equable way of getting the world's work done.

Certain things stand out pretty obviously. It is clear that in the timesahead of us there must be more economy in giving trouble and causingwork, a greater willingness to do work for ourselves, a great economy oflabour through machinery and skilful management. So much is unavoidableif we are to meet these enlarged requirements upon which the insurgentworker insists. If we, who have at least some experience of affairs, whoown property, manage businesses, and discuss and influence publicorganisation, if we are not prepared to undertake this work ofdiscipline and adaptation for ourselves, then a time is not far distantwhen insurrectionary leaders, calling themselves Socialists orSyndicalists, or what not, men with none of our experience, little ofour knowledge, and far less hope of success, will take that task out ofour hands.[1]

[Footnote 1: Larkinism comes to endorse me since this was written.]

We have, in fact, to "pull ourselves together," as the phrase goes, andmake an end to all this slack, extravagant living, this spectacle ofpleasure, that has been spreading and intensifying in every civilisedcommunity for the last three or four decades. What is happening toLabour is indeed, from one point of view, little else than thecorrelative of what has been happening to the more prosperous classes inthe community. They have lost their self-discipline, their gravity,their sense of high aims, they have become the victims of theiradvantages and Labour, grown observant and intelligent, has discovereditself and declares itself no longer subordinate. Just what powers ofrecovery and reconstruction our system may have under thesecircumstances the decades immediately before us will show.

Sec. 4

Let us try to anticipate some of the social developments that are likelyto spring out of the present Labour situation.

It is quite conceivable, of course, that what lies before us is notdevelopment but disorder. Given sufficient suspicion on one side andsufficient obstinacy and trickery on the other, it may be impossible torestore social peace in any form, and industrialism may degenerate intoa wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility isthe worst and perhaps the least probable of many. It is much moreacceptable to suppose that our social order will be able to adjustitself to the new outlook and temper and quality of the labour stratumthat elementary education, a Press very cheap and free, and a period ofgreat general affluence have brought about.

One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation will be a changedspirit in the general body of society. We have come to a seriouscondition of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order againwithout a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process. There can beno doubt that for a large portion of our comfortable classes existencehas been altogether too easy for the last lifetime or so. The great bulkof the world's work has been done out of their sight and knowledge; ithas seemed unnecessary to trouble much about the general conduct ofthings, unnecessary, as they say, to "take life too seriously." This hasnot made them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over-confident; therehas been an elaboration of trivial things and a neglect of troublesomeand important things. The one grave shock of the Boer War has long beenexplained and sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy toexplain away a dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as itwas to get a favourable interpretation upon some demonstration ofnational incompetence half the world away.

It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation thatthe British prosperous and the British successful, to whom warning afterwarning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin, Carlyle, MatthewArnold, should be called to account at last in their own household. Theywill grumble, they will be very angry, but in the end, I believe, theywill rise to the opportunities of their inconvenience. They will shakeoff their intellectual lassitude, take over again the public and privateaffairs they have come to leave so largely in the hands of the politicalbarrister and the family solicitor, become keen and critical andconstructive, bring themselves up to date again.

That is not, of course, inevitable, but I am taking now the more hopefulview.

And then? What sort of working arrangements are our renascent owning anddirecting classes likely to make with the new labouring class? How isthe work going to be done in the harder, cleaner, more equalised, andbetter managed State that, in one's hopeful mood, one sees ahead of us?

Now after the experiences of the past twelve months it is obvious thatthe days when most of the directed and inferior work of the communitywill be done by intermittently employed and impecunious wage-earners isdrawing to an end. A large part of the task of reconstruction ahead ofus will consist in the working out of schemes for a more permanent typeof employment and for a direct participation of the worker in the pride,profits, and direction of the work. Such schemes admit of widevariations between a mere bonus system, a periodic tipping of theemployees to prevent their striking and a real and honest co-partnery.

In the latter case a great enterprise, forced to consider its "hands" asbeing also in their degree "heads," would include a department oftechnical and business instruction for its own people. From such ideasone passes very readily to the conception of guild-managed businesses inwhich the factor of capital would no longer stand out as an elementdistinct from and contrasted with the proprietorship of the workers. Onesees the worker as an active and intelligent helper during the greatportion of his participation, and as an annuitant and perhaps, if he hasdevised economies and improvements, a receiver of royalties during hisdeclining years.

And concurrently with the systematic reconstruction of a large portionof our industries upon these lines there will have to be a vigorousdevelopment of the attempts that are already being made, in gardencities, garden suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass of ourpopulation in a more civilised and more agreeable manner. Probably thatis not going to pay from the point of view of the money-making businessman, but we prosperous people have to understand that there are thingsmore important and more profitable than money-making, and we have to taxourselves not merely in money, but in time, care, and effort in thematter. Half the money that goes out of England to Switzerland and theRiviera ought to go to the extremely amusing business of clearing upugly corners and building jolly and convenient workmen's cottages--evenif we do it at a loss. It is part of our discharge for the leisure andadvantages the system has given us, part of that just give and take,over and above the solicitor's and bargain-hunter's and money-lender'sconception of justice, upon which social order ultimately rests. We haveto do it not in a mood of patronage, but in a mood of attentivesolicitude. If not on high grounds, then on low grounds our class has toset to work and make those other classes more interested and comfortableand contented. It is what we are for. It is quite impossible for workmenand poor people generally to plan estates and arrange their own homes;they are entirely at the mercy of the wealthy in this matter. There isnot a slum, not a hovel, not an eyesore upon the English landscape forwhich some well-off owner is not ultimately to be blamed or excused, andthe less we leave of such things about the better for us in that day ofreckoning between class and class which now draws so near.

It is as plain now as the way from Calais to Paris that if the owningclass does not attend to these amenities the mass of the people, doingits best to manage the thing through the politicians, presently will.They may make a frightful mess of it, but that will never bring backthings again into the hands that hold them and neglect them. Their timewill have passed for ever.

But these are the mere opening requirements of this hope of mine of aquickened social consciousness among the more fortunate and leisurelysection of the community I believe that much profounder changes in theconditions of labour are possible than those I have suggested I ambeginning to suspect that scarcely any of our preconceptions about theway work must be done, about the hours of work and the habits of work,will stand an exhaustive scientific analysis. It is at least conceivablethat we could get much of the work that has to be done to keep ourcommunity going in far more toil-saving and life-saving ways than wefollow at the present time. So far scientific men have done scarcelyanything to estimate under what conditions a man works best, does mostwork, works more happily. Suppose it turns out to be the case that a manalways following one occupation throughout his lifetime, workingregularly day after day for so many hours, as most wage-earners do atthe present time, does not do nearly so much or nearly so well as hewould do if he followed first one occupation and then another, or if heworked as hard as he possibly could for a definite period and then tookholiday? I suspect very strongly, indeed I am convinced, that in certainoccupations, teaching, for example, or surgery, a man begins by workingclumsily and awkwardly, that his interest and skill rise rapidly, thatif he is really well suited in his profession he may presently becomeintensely interested and capable of enormous quantities of his very bestwork, and that then his interest and vigour rapidly decline I amdisposed to believe that this is true of most occupations, ofcoal-mining or engineering, or brick-laying or cotton-spinning. Thething has never been properly thought about. Our civilisation has grownup in a haphazard kind of way, and it has been convenient to specialiseworkers and employ them piecemeal. But if it is true that in respect ofany occupation a man has his period of maximum efficiency, then we openup a whole world of new social possibilities. What we really want from aman for our social welfare in that case is not regular continuing work,but a few strenuous years of high-pressure service. We can as acommunity afford to keep him longer at education and training before hebegins, and we can release him with a pension while he is still full oflife and the capacity for enjoying freedom. But obviously this isimpossible upon any basis of weekly wages and intermittent employment;we must be handling affairs in some much more comprehensive way thanthat before we can take and deal with the working life of a man as onecomplete whole.

That is one possibility that is frequently in my thoughts about thepresent labour crisis. There is another, and that is the greatdesirability of every class in the community having a practicalknowledge of what labour means. There is a vast amount of work whicheither is now or is likely to be in the future within the domain of thepublic administration--road-making, mining, railway work, post-officeand telephone work, medical work, nursing, a considerable amount ofbuilding for example. Why should we employ people to do the bulk ofthese things at all? Why should we not as a community do them ourselves?Why, in other words, should we not have a labour conscription and take ayear or so of service from everyone in the community, high or low? Ibelieve this would be of enormous moral benefit to our strained andrelaxed community. I believe that in making labour a part of everyone'slife and the whole of nobody's life lies the ultimate solution of theseindustrial difficulties.

Sec. 5

It is almost a national boast that we "muddle through" our troubles, andI suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a certainkindliness of temper, a humorous willingness to make the best of things,and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of pressures andextremities that would smash a harder, more brittle people only a littlechipped and damaged. And it is quite conceivable that our country will,in a measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjustment thatare now upon us, even if it never rises to any heroic struggle againstthese difficulties. But it may survive as a lesser country, as an